A new report details how president-elect Donald Trump’s economic advisers and GOP allies in Congress are plotting to make massive cuts to social safety net programs, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), in order to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy.
Those advisers and lawmakers are in “preliminary discussions,” a report from The Washington Post said.
The 2017 tax cuts, perhaps the most notable of Trump’s legislative initiatives during his first term in office, are set to expire within the next year. Extending the tax cuts would add another $4 trillion to the national debt.
Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP (sometimes referred to as food stamps) equaling the amount necessary to cover that budget shortfall would affect around 70 million Americans with lower incomes, according to the report by the Post, which cited anonymous sources with knowledge of the discussions.
Nothing has been finalized, the Post emphasized, but the discussions indicate a willingness by many in the GOP to trade off protections for people with lower incomes in order to ensure that the richest Americans get richer.
Trump didn’t spend much time speaking about Medicaid or SNAP during his presidential campaign, although in March he did allude to the idea that cuts could be coming.
“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements — in terms of cutting — and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump said half a year ago.
Amid public outcry over Trump’s indication that he was planning to cut social safety net programs, his campaign aides attempted to do damage control, saying at the time that he was “talking about cutting waste, not entitlements” (despite the fact that he clearly mentioned entitlements). The new reporting from the Post further clarifies that his campaign’s assurances were false.
Cuts to the programs could come in the form of spending caps, limiting the already paltry amounts that many people with lower incomes receive from Medicaid and SNAP. The talks have also included the idea of establishing or increasing work requirements for recipients of the programs.
The idea of requiring higher levels of work in order to qualify for the programs is taken directly from the playbook of Project 2025, a right-wing manifesto that Trump tried to distance himself from during the campaign due to its unpopularity, despite the fact he had many connections to its contributors. The document also proposes placing lifetime caps on benefits, per an analysis from KFF.
Recent polling on both programs show that they are widely popular, and that Americans by and large do not want to see significant changes to them. In a KFF poll from earlier this year, 86 percent of Medicaid enrollees, as well as 71 percent of people who aren’t enrolled in the program, said it “should largely continue as it is today” without changes. And polling conducted last year on SNAP benefits found that, rather than wanting cuts to the program, 85 percent of Americans wanted the government to do more to help people struggling to buy groceries, with 53 percent saying the government should do “much more.”
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